Experimental nominee

THE RUINS OF WAR
The advance of a giant with devastating footprints, walking relentlessly, heedless of what its footsteps tread upon. The cyclical nature of history, the one constant in human history, cannot avoid destruction, whether in the name of gods, homeland, economic or expansionist reasons.
No matter what force drives man to scorched earth, the scars remain on the walls of burning churches, on the torn surface of an ordinary house.

It almost seems that man has never been able to resist the destructive force of war;
trenches dug, armies advancing: death is sown where life used to be.
The materiality of what remains of this advance is the physical memory of the conflict:
home and land, entities intimately connected to humans as places of protection and birth, are destroyed.

This wide-ranging project, carried out between 2021 during the pope's visit to Iraq and the conflict in Donbass in 2022, aims to be a historical witness to the destruction, where the gaze is not only on the facts, but contemplates human dynamics and what will be the reality of tomorrow.

Gabriele Micalizzi is an Italian reporter specialized in war photojournalism, he has also been involved in long-term social, anthropological and ethnographic projects, without ever giving up his personal gaze.
He collaborates with national and international newspapers including: The New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, The Guardian, Vice UK, Le Monde, Rolling Stone Italia, Internazionale, Die Zeit, Corriere Della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa, Esquire and Ruptly.

He is one of the founders of the Cesura collective. In 2011 he began to report all the events related to the “Arab Spring”. In 2016 he won "Master of Photography" and began his collaboration with Leica. In the same year he presented his work on the Libyan situation: DOGMA.

In 2019, during the Kurdish offensive in the Baghuz area against the last bastion of Isis, he was wounded by an RPG rocket.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, he documented the area with the highest number of cases, traveling between Bergamo and the rest of Lombardy.

In 2022 he documented the war in Ukraine for WSJ, Die Zeit and Le Monde. For these works, he was awarded the Premiolino journalism prize at the Milan Triennale in September.